WoW crafting

Now that the WoW token is out and seems to be stabilized in price here in the US, well, as stable as something that osculates at 25% of it's own value about every 24 hours, at least. I'm getting back into crafting to "earn" my account's subscription. To that end I'm building up my Warlock's Garrison. I originally didn't want to do that, but I'm getting sucked in by the lure of gold. I can see Dr. Skinner laughing at me from outside the box.

This isn't a "How to pay for your account with crafting" post. You'll have to figure that out yourself. No, this is a "What I think of crafting in WoD and how can it be improved." post.

Gathering in WoD is done. All crafting materials are obtained by cooldown in your Garrison. I can see why they would do this, it essentially eliminates botting and resource grinding. Sure, you COULD still grind ore, leather, etc. But it's pointless in that few items that you would craft to sell are made from those, instead, they are made from "work orders" and other cooldowns in your crafting buildings.

You may still be able to grind "old school" mats, and there may still be a market for that, but I'm more interested in WoD.

The first thing that you notice is that once you run your Garrison maintenance, and manage whatever auctions you have in the AH, you're basically done for the day. With 2 Garrisons running to support 4 crafting buildings, 30 to 40 minutes is all I need to get everything done. Now, I'm still going to have to trap animals for the barns at some point, but my guild runs "trap groups" once a week or so. Trapping in a guild group is the way to go. It's a fun guild activity and you get all the trapped animals you could ever need.

In my opinion, Blizzard has made a huge mistake with the Garrisons by allowing you to have more than one of each type of crafting buildings per account. I can't have a problem with allowing you to use crafting buildings without the associated crafting skill, as I think that being limited to 2 is somewhat arbitrary. But the crafting buildings should be account unique. You are already prevented from putting two of the same kind in one garrison, extending that to include the entire account doesn't seen unreasonable. If you want to set up “Craft sweatshops” with multiple craft buildings all blasting cooldowns at once, you'll need an account per set of unique buildings.

If you replace “Grinding mats” with “Daily cooldown for mats” then you need to limit the number of cooldowns you can do to one set per account. It comes down to “How many of an item can you make in a day with the cooldowns.” Let's use Blacksmithing and the “Truesteel” line of armors for my example.

If you're thinking “Bah! 640 iLevel! That's junk you can get from LFR!” then you're not looking at the big picture. The 3 iLevel 640 items you can wear are for alts leveling from level 91, and there are iLevel minimums to get into Heroic Dungeons, LFR, etc. That's what these are for. Then, after you get most of a set of raid gear, you can use the crafted ones, boosted with the crafted booster items and rerolled with the stat changing item, to fill in those few slots the RNG didn't seem to want you to have.

So as long as the AH isn't flooded with them from craft farms, they can sell for decent gold. You can do 6 work orders a day, getting 2 Truesteel ingots per when a Follower is working. That's 12. Then you get 10 from doing the daily cooldown at max level. That's 22. On top of that, you can convert Primal Spirit (Along with some of the Mine generated mats.) into a few more per day. Blacksmithing is probably the easiest for that last part in that each Truesteel Ingot made requires only 5 of each of the ores the mine produces. You can typically get 10 more per day from a level 3 mine. That's 32 Truesteel Ingots per day. Per Blacksmithing Garrison.

That would be fine if you could have only one Forge building per account. In reality? I think I'm even being TOO generous with the cooldowns here. Look at my two Garrison setup, 2 barns, both Garrisons have mines and herb gardens. That supports 4 crafting skills with all their related daily cooldowns. And that's just 2 Garrisons. A lot of people have 4 or more.

There is a movement on the WoW forums calling for one account wide Garrison. I think that would be a mistake as well. I think the way to go is to make the cooldowns themselves account wide. If the design intent is for you to have 2 crafting professions at full speed, then limit the account to 2 crafting professions worth of cooldowns.

You could even take it one step further, having only one level 3 Garrison per account. If you did that, however, you would need to allow your “alts” to visit your “main's” Garrison for the special vendors.

The ability to craft things has to cost you something. Either time spent grinding (Which causes RMT and botting problems.) or money in the form of extra playing fees.